PEABODY — Between Sept. 1 and Oct. 10, more than 800 drivers were captured on camera illegally passing a school bus while it was stopped, a figure that officials say only reinforces the need for legislation cracking down on the drivers who commit the dangerous act.
The number emerged from a survey conducted by BusPatrol, the results of which were announced at a press conference outside the Higgins Middle School on Thursday morning. In April, the School Committee authorized Mayor Ted Bettencourt to enter into a zero-cost pilot program with the company.
BusPatrol said the staggering statistic was collected from cameras placed on 10 buses throughout the city during the course of roughly 30 school days. And, the areas of the city where illegal bus passing was most frequently observed were on Andover, Margin, and Central streets — a fact that came to no surprise to Bettencourt.
Illegal bus passing in Peabody
Drivers failed to stop for buses despite stop-arms and flashing lights.
A pair of bus drivers, Claire McNair and Kathleen Kraemer, who work as safety officers for Healey Buses, which owns seven of the 10 buses included in the survey, said they see illegal passings each and every say.
“We’re doing everything we can to warn them,” McNair said. “They do anything they can to get around us.”
“Drivers are getting creative,” Kraemer added.
The company’s president and chief innovation officer, Justin Meyers, said the results collected in Peabody prove illegal bus passing is an epidemic.
“That is a serious crisis,” he said. “It really endangers the community, it endangers children.”
The effort to crack down on illegal bus passing in Peabody can be traced back to the efforts of one woman — Maria Scheri, a parent who founded the Stop the Operator from Passing campaign and co-chairs the city’s School Safety Task Force.
“Basically, I saw something and I said something,” said Scheri, who wore a T-shirt that read “It’s big, it’s yellow, it has red flashing lights. What part do you not see?”
“I was fortunate enough to have people in my city listen to me and help me to do something about it,” she added.
And, she said, the results of the survey prove that if drivers are ignoring school buses in Peabody, they are doing it throughout the state.
“It’s sad that we’ve got to the point where a motorist can’t stop for 30 seconds to let a kid cross the street and I just feel that we all need to do a little bit better,” Scheri said, urging her fellow residents to get involved and lobby their representatives.
During the press conference, Bettencourt and other officials, including state Reps. Tom Walsh and Sally Kerans, who represent Peabody, lauded Scheri’s work.
Walsh and Kerans are among the petitioners of House Bill 3440, along with state Sen. Joan Lovely, who also represents the city, and other legislators. That bill, An Act concerning the safety of school children embarking and disembarking school buses, would “authorize the installation and operation of digital video violation detection monitoring systems to detect drivers failing to stop for school buses,” according to the legislature.
The way state law is currently set up, police are required to identify an operator based on footage collected from buses.
“We can’t identify the operator currently just on the video we have, so it makes it a little difficult for us,” Peabody Police Sgt. James Harkins said during the press conference.
The legislation, Walsh said, would penalize the owners of vehicles caught on camera illegally passing school buses. The bill also includes, to alleviate concerns about privacy, protections for the passing driver, the bus company, and police, according to Walsh.
“The idea is to identify who owns the vehicle, and they’re responsible for whoever’s driving it, and that person would then be the person who would be cited,” he said, noting that the citations would not be deemed moving violations and thus would not influence a driver’s insurance.
The bill is before the Transportation Committee, of which Kerans is a member, and members heard testimony on the legislation Tuesday — including from Scheri.
Walsh said the results of the survey will likely bolster the chances the bill, which has languished in the legislature in one form or another for a decade, becomes law this session.
“The efforts of everybody standing behind me adds to the momentum of this bill,” he said. “What we’re illustrating today is if this happens in Peabody, then it’s happening in every community across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. If they see what we’re doing here, and they want to do it in their community, it will only create more of a groundswell to get this legislation passed.”
